What’s in a name?

(I posted the following to LinkedIn a few weeks ago, and realized I should echo it here.)

I've been remiss in explaining my name change here! Which by now may be old news. :) If you knew me as Erin Hoffman or Erin Hoffman-John, this is for you. I promise I remain the same person. ;) Insofar as any of us remain the same from day to day.

TLDR: I'm using a professional name that better reflects my cultural background (and both Drake and Kajioka are family names from maternal branches of my family), for purposes of authenticity and visibility in a societal context where I've felt increasingly compelled to be visible as an Asian person.

Over the last year I've discovered how much of an unsupported edge case a name change is! -- but it’s important to me for a few reasons:

☀️ For as long as I can remember, my name has never really felt right. It became a representation of my confusion regarding my ethnic background: English, German, Danish, Irish, and apparently a little Greek on my dad’s side, Chinese and Japanese on my mother’s side. How is a name supposed to contain all of that? I can't count the number of times I got the question “What are you?” from random strangers when I was a kid.
☀️ People are consistently a little confused when they meet me for the first time. They often won’t say exactly why, but it’s clear and obvious on a google image search – I don’t look like the usual “Erin Hoffman”.
☀️ The rise of hate crime and hateful expression toward Asian people documented by #StopAsianHate has made me feel more strongly that I have a responsibility to be visible as an Asian American.
☀️ Language matters, and a name is a crucial part of language – I want it to be a more balanced reflection of who I am.

A bit of trivia on the name I chose!

🕹️ “Hoffman” is of course my father’s surname. “Drake” is his mother’s surname.
🕹️ “Kajioka” (梶岡) is the birth surname of my great-grandmother on my mother’s side.
🕹️ My great-great-grandmother immigrated to Hawaii in 1900 from Japan – before Hawaii was a state. One of my life side quests is to obtain Kajioka, Higuchi, and Asakawa koseki tōhon (戸籍謄本) to trace that side of my ancestry.
🕹️ The assortment of possible surnames included Kitchen, Asakawa, Lee, Hom, Higuchi, Nye, Main, Sicklesteel, Walter, Morse, and Cooke. (The Hoffman branch was also Huffman at one time and there are Dutch/German surnames I’m missing.)
🕹️ The Drake->Nye->Cooke side of my family descends from Francis Cooke, who was on the Mayflower with two other Cookes.
🕹️ And on the name change in general: it was normative for Buddhist monks to change their names, usually once every few decades, to reflect personal evolution.

I’m happy to discuss this if you’re interested! I’ve found people have been kind of curious about this process and the thinking that led to it. Send an email, ask in person – I don’t mind. :) I have a FAQ actually but it exceeds length limits here. ;) and since this is my blog, here it is below!

ehj->ekaj FAQ:

• Are you still married?
  Yep! No changes there.
  

• Are you changing your legal name?
  Nope! Part of my intention was to create a kind of bifurcation between my public and private name, to give me a bit more anonymity. I do a fair amount of public speaking, am googleable, etc, and am using my work name as a layer of obfuscation so that my work can be public without necessarily making my family discoverable. The internet is a less friendly place than it used to be. (But also authors have used pen names for a long time for this, and other, reasons.) Obviously I am not obscuring the ties between the names, I’m just adding a speed bump.
  

• Why didn’t you consider keeping ‘Hoffman’?
  I figure I’ve given it several decades, it’s time for another name’s turn. :) (Some of you know that I lost my dad last May. I actually spoke with him about the public name change before he died. He has always been very emotionally connected to ‘Drake’ and thought it was interesting.)
  

• How do you pronounce ‘Kajioka’?
  kah-jee-OH-ka
  

• Why did you drop the hyphen?
  It turns out computers (or the people who program them) are really really bad with hyphens and I was tired of it. I wish it wasn’t this way.
  

• Is it ‘Erin’ or ‘Erin Drake’?
  I respond to both, and if you call me Erin Drake, you’ll be helping me try that on. I’m inspired by Mary Robinette Kowal’s insistence on being “Mary Robinette” on this.
  

• Who are you again?
  (Okay, people aren’t asking this, but I shared this pretty widely in an attempt not to miss folks, so I expect some are wondering.)